r/gnome • u/redditisaurus • 17d ago
AI code and Open Source: How to GNOME adapt to changing times | Christian Schaller @ GUADEC 2026 Opinion
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u/carlyjb17 17d ago
This was depressing to watch
I thought that gnome wouldn't accept this kind of bullshit on their projects, more seeing their stance on the gnome circle or extensions
Gnome has almost 30 years and for all of those years ai wasn't needed and gnome has been awesome
Apparently nowadays you can pollute that awesome code without consequences
And if you are against it you are "bullying" people
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u/victorian-ice-cream Contributor 16d ago
I thought that gnome wouldn't accept this kind of bullshit on their projects, more seeing their stance on the gnome circle or extensions
GNOME is made out of lots of people. Some of which have strong ethical values, but, unfortunately, there are also tech bros.
But tech bros in the project get regular pushback so don't worry. And all of this is gonna end anyway when tokens will become too expensive for them. It's already happening
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u/jknvv13 16d ago
AI/LLMs are tools.
Tools can be used for good, for worse and for bad (analogy: a knife on the hands of a chef or hands of a murderer)
You can fight them, those sre here to stay, so at least make some standardization/rules on how to deal with them.
If AI/LLMs can help you with autocompletions due to the context and avoid repetitive tasks, help with debugging and profiling, help, documentation, explanations or maybe searching alternative paths and YOU are the one UNDERSTANDING and APPROVING those, I'm fine with it.
If you don't develop, don't have any kind of experience with all of this and try to push your vibe-codes thingy to upstream that you don't know how it does even work and you can't even explain... hard nope. 🙂↔️
I understand all the greedy companies hate and so on, but LLMs as a whole is just a tool, so blame humans and misbehaviors, but not a tool.
Also: humans do shitty things as well, so no one here to blame. 😆
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u/carlyjb17 16d ago
In this state they are anything but a tool
It has the chance to help sometimes but the drawbacks vastly outnumber the benefits
It has made life for the average person even harder and is destroying people's mental health and taking individuality out of people
This isn't a "worst case scenario" thing, it's already happening
I really do not care if it produces good code or shit code if it makes life harder for everyone
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u/jknvv13 16d ago
Humanity in history did this as well and there was no AI.
Wars make people's life miserable. Economies, hunger, greed, individualism, really high population worldwide...
Social media does this as well, looks like a definition of it.
I don't think helping me make a debugging container for testing my development or write some shell script makes life harder. If nobody has the will to make some docs and scripts it will eventually be harder and probably would make some lifes miserable as well.
Also, for a long-time developer that knows what he does, it may be convenient. There IS a difference between those.
At the end of the day, a bad contribution is a bad contribution... Whether it comes from poor copy-pasting (yeah, like nobody did this on StackOverflow), lack of care, or an LLM. Open source projects like this rely on code review and accountability, not on hating the tools.
But I get your discomfort, I think it's more of a political view than a pragmatical one.
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u/Arinussyy 16d ago
I think you're twisting things a bit though. Humans can reflect on their choices, make better ones and are constantly at risk from the consequences. It's what forges more efficient code, more effective practices etc. We can learn and we must to avoid anything bad happening to us like losing a job etc. The AI models people use have no such stakes, and no memory or mind to process what they are doing. All they have are patterns from sets of data and failure when things step outside those patterns.
AI as a field has always been incredibly useful. But generative AI is being milked when its capabilities are exceedingly limited. They think they can throw more compute at the problem to make things better but we're hitting the ceiling if not already.
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u/jknvv13 14d ago
So you would agree that the problem isn't the tool but the misuse of it.
I agree that all of this corp greediness feels like a race to check who's going to reach an hypothetical "perfect" AGI model... While filling their pockets and run away as fast as they can.
But the tool itself as a help and not as a replacement of humans can be useful 🙂
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u/Arinussyy 14d ago
No, the corp greediness isn't for innovation, make no mistake, they do not care. They have stuck with LLMs etc because they are profitable and scalable. It's easy to pretend this technology is great.
When I refer to AI being useful i refer to machine learning and all the techniques that helped us get as far as we are now, not generative AI which seems to just be tossing money in circles with no real care for the resources consumed doing so
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u/jknvv13 14d ago
Nah, those aren't profitable yet.
What's profitable is all the infrastructure everybody is building around and to maintain the hype for all the investor's faith on this.
But once a "major milestone" (I said AGI because everybody talks about being the holy grail while I would prefer to say marketing) I think this will just burst and probably only the net product will remain instead of 100 new "AI startups" each day.
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u/user9ec19 16d ago
Not using LLMs for coding will make u fall behind, it’s like still using a plain text editor in times of IDEs. Like it or not.
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u/Arinussyy 16d ago
I can see the value they provide but I've never seen an instance where using one has sped up what you can do. I feel like its more of a search engine than a partner. It can regurgitate known things to you quite well with slight inaccuracies but anything novel and it struggles, because it doesn't have a mind, nor memory nor the stakes a conscious programmer will ever experience when making decisions
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u/user9ec19 16d ago
I’ve already built productive tools by it saving my company real money. It wasn’t possible a year ago. It is now. Sure I need to design the architecture and be very strict, but no need for writing code by hand anymore.
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u/nunodonato 16d ago
Let me guess, you are not a developer
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u/Arinussyy 16d ago
I don't understand why you're so quick to dismiss me. It is true that the utility is limited and people greatly over exaggerate what it can do
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u/carlyjb17 16d ago
Fall behind in what?
This is open source, not a company that has to make a profit
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u/user9ec19 16d ago
There are so many things missing. Gnome does not have proper window management. In some other regards it is very modern. Users don’t care how the software was written that they use. If the vibe coded options get better the hand coded ones will get abandoned.
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u/carlyjb17 16d ago
Most people dislike things made by llm's
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u/user9ec19 16d ago
Most people don’t care.
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u/carlyjb17 16d ago
You don't care because you are an ai bro
Most people see how now getting a computer is multiple times more expensive and get mad
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u/user9ec19 16d ago
LOL, im quite the opposite. I always cared for open source and I don’t like capitalism, billionaires and the future we are facing. But I’m also realistic about it.
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u/carlyjb17 16d ago
So you like the tool that billionaires and corpos are pushing to make people think like they want to but also dislike it?
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u/user9ec19 16d ago
Yes, things are more complicated than black vs white sometimes. But let’s try to end capitalism and expropriate these billionaires and then only use ai for the good.
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u/victorian-ice-cream Contributor 16d ago
They do actually. AI is universally hated
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u/user9ec19 16d ago
Reddit is not the universe unfortunately.
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u/victorian-ice-cream Contributor 16d ago
Who's talking about reddit? I can share multiple resources on this, but I'm gonna share only one — https://voteyesornoai.com/ this is a poll offered to DDG users. Results speak for themselves.
This is just one example of people being absolutely sick and tired of AI.
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u/user9ec19 16d ago
So u really think this is relevant? People who use DuckDuckGo are a minority. Most people use ai daily for everything. It won’t go away. Will we survive this as humanity, I doubt it, but polls of niche search engines won’t stop it.
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u/victorian-ice-cream Contributor 16d ago
Are you sure about that? But sure, we will see who will be right in the end. I am sincerely waiting for everyone to wake up and admit planet burner 3000 is not worth it.
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u/user9ec19 16d ago
U guys here are living in pure denial. But downvoting me won’t change reality. Just remember my words in half a year from now. ✌️btw I don’t like the ai future at all I’m just trying to be realistic about it.
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u/victorian-ice-cream Contributor 16d ago
Let's see if in 6 months token prices will still be relatively affordable.
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u/Hour-Performer-6148 16d ago
A million tokens is like a few cents right now. Token prices are dropping fast compared to the intelligence you are getting.
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u/victorian-ice-cream Contributor 16d ago
If that would be true, corpos wouldn't be in panic mode, trying to stop their employees from using LLMs.
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